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Excellent Table Beer

A beer brewed from malt, hops, yeast, and water, fermented and aged for a year.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Malt and beer work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 55 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Excellent Table Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mash

  1. Pour 39 gallons of hot water over 3 bushels of malt.

  2. Cover and let it sit for 30 minutes.

Boil and ferment

  1. Boil the hops with the wort for 2 hours.

  2. Cool the mixture and add 3 quarts of yeast.

  3. Cover the bung-hole with paper after fermentation.

  4. Add 1½ pounds of dried hops to the bung-hole before sealing.

Age

  1. Let it stand in casks for 12 months and in bottles for another 12 months before drinking.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Malt + beertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together55 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Hops + beertop 42% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together0 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  3. Malt + hopstop 49% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1 recipe

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Malt
Supplies the sugars that yeast ferments into alcohol, and body to the beer.
Hops
Add bitterness that balances the malt's sweetness and help preserve the beer.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the wort into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Dried hops
Added at sealing to contribute aroma and further hop character.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture before adding yeast. Yeast is killed or stressed by hot wort, so the mixture must cool before the yeast goes in. Adding yeast too early can stop fermentation before it starts.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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